Fathers and Sons

Nikolai Petrovitch went back quickly, and going up to a tall man in a long, loose, rough coat with tassels, who had only just got out of the carriage, he warmly pressed the ungloved red hand, which the latter did not at once hold out to him.

Bazarov's nihilist challenge → romantic entanglements → duel with Pavel Petrovich → typhus death makes plot an ideological experiment tested by love and mortality, so plot scores 91.

No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.

Bazarov, Arkady, Pavel Petrovich, Anna Odintsova, and Nikolai Petrovich each embody a position in the fathers-and-sons debate, so cast scores 90.

The combat to take place early to-morrow, at six, let us say, behind the copse, with pistols, at a distance of ten paces.... At ten paces? that will do; we hate one another at that distance.

Twenty-eight chapters of country-house dialogue dilate the middle, but the Odintsova estate and duel compress tension—tempo is essayistic rather than thriller, so pace scores 84.

Good-bye.... Listen ... you know I didn't kiss you then.... Breathe on the dying lamp, and let it go out ....

Turgenev's lucid realism—Bazarov dissecting frogs, Pavel Petrovich's vanity, the deathbed scene—fuses social portraiture with lyrical restraint, so prose scores 91.

His name was Nikolai Petrovitch Kirsanov. He had, twelve miles from the posting station, a fine property of two hundred souls, or, as he expressed it—since he had arranged the division of his land with the peasants, and started 'a farm'—of nearly five thousand acres.

Kirsanov estate, Odintsov manor, and provincial Russia under emancipation form a laboratory for nihilism versus tradition, so world scores 89.

'Daddy,' he said, 'let me introduce you to my great friend, Bazarov, about whom I have so often written to you. He has been so good as to promise to stay with us.'

Arkady bringing Bazarov home establishes the generational fault line before the household reacts—ignition is intellectual rather than sensational, so hook scores 87.

No, it's not the same thing. A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.

Coined "nihilist" for fiction and made generational conflict the engine of the Russian novel—Bazarov as first modern anti-hero defeated by feeling itself, so innov scores 92.

Vassily Ivanovitch was seized by a sudden frenzy. 'I said I should rebel,' he shrieked hoarsely, with his face inflamed and distorted, shaking his fist in the air, as though threatening some one; 'and I rebel, I rebel!'

Bazarov's death and the fathers' reconciliation bury the nihilist while Arkady embraces marriage and land—structurally complete though the ideological question remains open, so ending scores 86.